The Jupiter Theft

Then one of the eggplants quivered and shifted its position. Jameson for the first time noticed the vestigial limbs, six flipperlike stumps, that sprawled out uselessly from their bloated bulks. The heads must be on the other side of the sawtooth partition, feeding mindlessly at an endless trough…

He managed to switch off the console before being sick on the floor.

A nursery! He’d tuned in a Cygnan nursery! Those nonsentient hulks must have been bred through countless generations to give blood and body fluids, the way humans had bred milk cows. They were nothing but brainless food factories.

Jameson tried to put his discovery in a rational light. He told himself that laying hens and feed-lot cattle and beef hamsters were practically vegetables, some of them barely ambulant. He reminded himself that people once had swallowed oysters alive, back in the days when it was still safe to eat oysters. But the sour taste in his mouth wouldn’t go away. He kept seeing an image of the oozing, abraded wound in the hide of one of the purple creatures when a Cygnan nurse had yanked a feeding tyke away.

When his stomach settled down, Jameson tried again. This time he got it right. The three-ring cluster of screens displayed what appeared to be a library index in simplified visual terms suitable for a being who had asked for information in babytalk.

On one screen a wheel of tiny glittering images rotated slowly against darkness. No, it wasn’t a wheel, it was a spiral, pulling bright little midges out of infinity.

A second screen showed the unwinding spiral edge-on. The little pictures marched on from the side of the screen in a widening funnel, feeding the outer rim.

The third screen was close-ups, one by one, of each image as it reached the point on the spiral where it disappeared.

Evidently even Cygnan children could look at all three screens at once and make sense out of the procession. The principle of organization was incomprehensible to Jameson. It all seemed random, in no particular order. But then, he told himself, a Cygnan would say the same thing about an alphabetized listing in a human dictionary.

Helplessly Jameson watched the images flow past. The subject headings were fascinating in themselves, but he was all too aware that he might be interrupted at any moment. There was a generalized botanical representation of fat blue leaves and salmon-colored fruits that would have driven Dmitri wild. It gave way to a disembodied Cygnan eye with the spiral galaxy in Andromeda, exactly as it was seen from Earth, reflected in its depths. Then there was a construction of shiny metal rods working away like a model steam engine. And a length of green rope patiently tying and untying itself into a recognizable square knot.

Jameson tried strumming the word Tetrachord had given him for “planet.” Immediately the spiral flow of midges speeded into a streaking blur and came to a stop. On the close-up screen was a swollen red ball against a background of unfamiliar constellations.

The screen asked him a question.

Jameson almost jumped out of his skin. Then he realized that the Cygnan voice had to be mechanical: recorded or computer-generated.

After a pause, the artificial voice queried him again. Crestfallen, Jameson realized that he couldn’t understand. He was used to talking to Tetrachord and Triad, period.

On a hunch, he strummed the word for “yes.”

The spiraling midges disappeared. He was peering at a strange landscape, identical on all three screens.

In the foreground was a city. Soaring towers reached into a lemon sky, stark shapes that no human mind had conceived. There were jagged shards of shiny black stone traced with networks of white threadlike exterior paths for climbing. There were angular shafts with jutting cantilevered branches. Three knife-edged spires leaned toward one another to meet at a common apex, their bases enclosing a triangular park landscaped with blue vegetation. Traffic moved in a thick stream around the buildings, three-wheeled vehicles shaped like upright eggs, changing direction without turning. The drivers, visible through the transparent bubbles, were Cygnans, clinging to a central pole, with passengers and baggage disposed around them in a circle.

Jameson’s breath quickened. This was no spaceship interior landscape. He was looking at what could only be the Cygnans’ home planet.

He stared greedily, trying to absorb details.

The buildings cast complicated shadows, washed-out fingers of color that stretched in all directions. It was day, but that yellow sky was almost filled with an enormous ruddy moon, a squashed moon that ballooned from horizon to zenith. There was a slice out of one side. Its outline was fuzzy, its face marbled.

The Cygnan observer panned across the landscape.

There were two suns, low on the horizon. The smaller of the two was a fiercely glaring blue-white hole in the sky. The other was a swollen red giant. But something was wrong with it. It bulged on one side.